SDL

For what it's worth, most (all?) the comparisons in that phoronix article [1] compare the performance of apps running under XWayland (in a Wayland session) versus an Xorg session. That's because most steam games use SDL 2 which still uses XWayland by default (the default has been changed in SDL 3 though [2]). So using the data from that article to conclude that "[Xorg] still generally outperforms Wayland" seems wrong. A comparison between native Wayland apps vs Xorg apps would have been a lot more relevant though. [1] - https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-510-wayland [2] - https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/pull/6362

If you want a comfortable developer experience without having to "develop standard functionality," choose another language. C is the "now code the rest of the owl" of programming languages. Otherwise: libcurl for the requests, json-c[0] for the JSON handling. SDL2[1] for window handling/events/other glue stuff if necessary. I don't know what rocksdb is but I assume it has its own C API library. [0]https://github.com/json-c/json-c [1]https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL

The example provided is insufficient to state c++ package managers are easy. Firstly the meson.build file has a few libs mentioned 1)fmt and 2)sdl2. Let's go with that. Usually all libs have version tags associated: https://github.com/fmtlib/fmt/releases/tag/9.1.0 https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/releases/tag/release-2.24.... Rust Cargo.toml files help you to specify the version number or place * for the latest version. It is well documented it fetches the crate from crates.io or it will specify elsewhere explicitly. I see nothing of that within meson.build in your example. meson.build documentation states you may specify a version, but there is nothing there stating by default it gets the latest version. https://mesonbuild.com/Reference-manual_functions.html#depen... I see nothing mentioning the latest version of each package is fet

SDL has three methods for detecting input devices [1]: udev, inotify, and, as a fallback, enumerating /dev/input. It seems like Papers, Please uses a statically linked version of SDL, without udev or inotify support compiled in. 1: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/d0de4c625ad26ef540166...

SDL has its own "dynapi" layer, where you can override it with your own copy of SDL even if it was statically linked: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/docs/README-dyna...